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JULES DE BALINCOURT
THERE ARE MORE EYES THAN LEAVES ON THE TREES
On view at our Paris Marais Gallery and as an Online Viewing Experience
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Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jules de Balincourt. This latest series of abstract landscapes, initiated over a year ago, express a desire for both physical and emotional escape. Mixing intimate and large formats, many of these paintings convey the soothing presence of nature and manifest the need for a shelter far from the world we live in. Created while Jules de Balincourt was splitting his time between Costa Rica, where he has been living partially for the past 20 years, and Brooklyn, where he has spent the last few months in lockdown, the paintings result from a personal reflection on the possibilities of isolation.
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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‘I like the idea of placing the viewer at these crossroads of painting, in which one’s emotive response hovers between rational realism or figuration, on the one hand, and the abstract subconscious or primitive on the other.’
Jules de Balincourt, born in Paris, France in 1972, moved to Los Angeles, California with his family in the early 1980s. In 1998 he graduated from the California College of Arts in San Francisco and moved to Brooklyn in 2000. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and a small town in Costa Rica.
Early in his career he participated in significant group exhibitions such as Greater New York held at PS1/MoMA (2005); Notre histoire… at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2006); Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (2007) and USA TODAY both at The Royal Academy, London (2006) and The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia (2007).He has held a number of international solo museum exhibitions including Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2010); Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2013); Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, Rochechouart (2014); The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2014-2015); Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel (2015); and recently participated in the important group exhibitions Rehang at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2019 - ongoing) and Eldorado 3000 with two exhibitions: Les enfants du paradis, MUba Eugène Leroy Tourcoing and Eldorama, Tripostal, Lille, France (2019). He is currently preparing a solo show that will open in March 2021 at CAC Málaga, Spain.
Balincourt’s work is part of museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; and Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art.
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HISTORICAL SURVEY
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Oscillating between utopia and dystopia, Jules de Balincourt’s paintings explore indoor and outdoor spaces that suggest an ever-changing landscape – both physical and psychological. His colourful and stylised work is praised for evoking narrative, cultural, and historical identifiers while simultaneously maintaining a focus on painterly formal elements. Amalgamating movements such as Pop art, folk art, figuration and abstraction, Balincourt unites an array of formal properties in a single dreamlike space. Painting on board, the artist rarely works from photographs or images. Instead he uses various techniques – including stencilling, masking, abrading and spray painting - to improvise, so each work is unique and unexpected. In varying sizes, Balincourt’s diverse works are linked through motifs and subject matter that include cityscapes, mises en scène and formally arranged figures.
In the paintings for which he first became known, Balincourt questioned structures of power, reflecting on systems of exploitation and the use of technology, but also interrogating pop culture stereotypes such as the figure of the lonesome cowboy. Often disguising complex social commentary in seemingly innocuous scenes, Balincourt’s paintings reveal myriad details that undermine or complicate the apparent narrative.
In his subsequent map-based works, Balincourt freed himself from any obligation to accurately represent the world in terms of continents, countries, and borders. Attempting instead to render a more universal sense of time and space, the artist reminds us that we also inhabit inner worlds. These images, which verge on the abstract, are more symbolic than diagrammatic. A sense of things breaking apart and reconnecting equally informs a series of works depicting explosions and radiations in bold colours. Expressing a dual impression of creation and destruction, the paintings become pure fields of energy.
In recent years, the artist has moved away from direct references to contemporary social, political or popular culture, and instead depicts a world in which indications of specific place or time are absent. This development demonstrates Balincourt’s newfound interest in the removal of figuration, in a quest for a more spiritual or existential approach to painting. The juxtaposition of bold colours, as well as the luxuriant presence of nature, recalls the visual characteristics that defined turn-of-the-century Primitivism and the Nabis group, while offering a meditation on the meaning of contemporary life.
Inviting us to journey across territories that might be celestial or earthbound, nocturnal or sunlit, the artist often cites the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as an important influence on his work. However, the Bay Area figurative painters from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Richard Diebenkorn or Elmer Bischof, had an equally significant role during his formative years, as Jules de Balincourt grew up in California and studied in San Francisco before moving to New York. His work also reveals the influence of 20th-century American modernists who brought the tradition of landscape painting into the field of abstraction, such as Arthur Dove or Milton Avery.
